This should have taken us half an hour, but we spent more than one hour just trying to understand why our pieces didn’t look like the ones in the wiki and why this had happened.

The first part with the main body of the mechanism went well, we only had to adjust slightly the position of the small gear on the motor axis that came already mounted but at the wrong height.

Then we had to assemble the Drive bolt, and this was terrible. At the beginning we thought that we had lost some pieces and searched the lab for an hour checking and rechecking. We bought 2 kits so we also thought maybe the pieces were not divided equally in the 2 boxes, and took apart the second kit but no luck there either. So let’s see what the pieces should have looked like in the third and second version of the Ultimaker kit.

And this is what we had

So it’s the wooden pieces of rev 2 and one of the plastic pieces of rev 3. Clearly Ultimaker made a huge mistake, in rev 2 they had a simple drive bolt with just a Delrin part, two pieces of plywood and the screw to adjust it, but after the huge success that Bertho’s upgrade had on thingiverse, they decided to include this design in rev 3, and made a much more complicated drive bolt with a bearing and different pieces of wood and another delrin plate to fit the bearing. And when we bought the kit (end of 2012) they sent us the upgraded delrin part but no bearing and no wooden pieces. We tried printing out the missing pieces from thingiverse to build a full rev 3 version, but had no way of getting our hands on the correct bearing. And we couldn’t try and build a full rev2 version because the delrin part has a different shape and wouldn’t touch the filament. So, as you can imagine, we were stuck. And angry.

And we wrote to Ultimaker to explain the problem.

As I was telling you we bought the kit at the end of 2012, and received it much much later because of duty issues. We also had a huge amount of work to do in this period so we had to postpone the assembly for a month. It sounds as a pretty standard situation to me, taking into account that to build this kind of kit you need at least a couple of days, it’s not something you take home and plug into the wall to check if everything works right away. But Ultimaker sent us a reply telling us that we should have filed any report for missing parts in the first 2 weeks after receiving it.

But they kindly gave us the link where to BUY the parts THEY DIDN’T send and for which we had already payed!!

The kit costs 22€ and it certainly is not a big deal and as they point out the Terms of service state:

7.4. Missing parts should be mentioned in writing or by e-mail to ULTIMAKER within fourteen (14) days after the delivering date.

this is all true, but I would expect something more from a company like ultimaker, the mistake is clearly theirs and I’m certain there were many more kits shipped out with this problem in that period. Sending me a couple of bearings and pieces of plywood would have cost them just a few euros and made me a happy costumer. A happy costumer that would have blogged enthusiastically about their behavior and would have chosen to buy filament and other stuff from their website instead of other.

So after all the work we did to have the printer ready for this occasion, we had to just show a partially assembled printer because of Ultimaker’s incompetence.

The explanations for the fan duct are again wrong, we had some different pieces of plywood and the air duct looked different too but this time we found no explanations looking back to the previous versions. Maybe they just like to change things without notice.

Luckily this piece is much easier and just has to cover all the circuit and convey the air flow on it, so we fixed things with a lot of blue tape. Works, but again it’s annoying and they should have posted better pictures of the folding of the cooling duct sheet.

The last step is just connecting everything to the circuit board and the instructions are clear, we also had the Ulticontroller to build, and that was fairly straight forward, with just some difficulty making the cables fit nicely out of the slot.

So this is it for now, because we are missing a piece to complete the assembly.

Next time: leveling and software, but no first print until I receive the missing pieces or find the right bearing to use with Bertho’s upgrade.